Ember Babiak

The first sestina I wrote, as part of a class in formal poetry, absolutely stunk. It was more proof of concept than poem. But I was hooked. Something about writing to the end of the line intrigued me, as did the way pairs of the repetons (the end-words that get repeated in a proscribed pattern) approach and depart from each other like lovers. I know this puts me in a tiny minority. I’ve seen sestina hate voiced online. I mean, using six words seven times without redundancy can be a challenge. So someone would have to be insane to hybridize the sestina with the crown of sonnets to create a form where you use fourteen words fifteen times. Well, I am mentally ill (everything’s well managed at this point, no worries, no shame) so there’s that.

We (as in, me, myself, and I) don’t remember quite how the idea came to us. We were living in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Buckle of the Bible Belt, as we call it, which really tells you all you need to know about the place, though we can provide more detail. The first thing Shreveporters ask a newcomer (and this has been documented) is, “Have you found a church yet?” (We wanted to ask, “What, did you lose one?” or, “We didn’t realize we were participating in a scavenger hunt.”) And yet the economy relied on the influx of money sopped up from visitors to the gambling boats permanently docked on the Red River. (Gambling remained illegal on land,  but not on the water.) And the streets were dotted with drive-thru daiquiri joints that got around the open-container law by taping straws to the lids. We could tell a hundred stories to illustrate the virulence of the hypocrisy of the brand of Christianity practiced in Shreveport, but instead, we offer one more piece of data: Shreveport is the hometown of our theocratic Speaker of the House, Christofascist Mike Johnson.

I remember I had the idea of merging these forms, but, though I could see the pattern of the repetons in the sestina, I couldn’t figure out how to expand it from six to fourteen. Enter my polymath husband who used to amuse himself as a boy doing magic squares (a sort of proto-sudoku). I showed him the sestina and told him what I wanted, and soon enough I had a table with the repetons labeled a-n and the columns from left to right showing the fourteen sections and the coda. Then I asked him for fourteen words. I wanted as little conscious control as possible. Because he knows I love a challenge (and because he’s a bit of a stinker) that first iteration of the form has words like “monorail” and “involuted” (which sent me to the dictionary). The poem eventually became the title poem for my book, CONSPIRACY OF LEAVES (Plain View Press, 2010). I took my time with it, doing just one numbered section a day, writing the repetons at the right margin according to the table and writing to the end of the line. I let myself enjamb some lines, but not the sections. Each one can stand alone. I wanted to sleep in between writing each section to give my brain a chance to reset. I wanted to ensure there was as little conscious connection between the sections as I could manage. I wanted to tap into the richer soil of that part of the mind I’m not in control of, which is much smarter than I am.

Before we launch into one of these works (I’ve written five now, plus one that’s been left in a maimed state for a few years, with a few sections I decided didn’t work, and now that I’ve confessed this I’ll have to either resurrect and finish it or put it out of its misery), we look up the fourteen words in the dictionary so we can have all of their usages at our disposal. In a PRI called “Accommodations” we used the word “water” as one of them. Dear Reader, you would be amazed at all the meanings those two syllables can carry.

I have tried it both ways: writing the first section spontaneously and taking the end words as the repetons, or curating a list beforehand, sometimes over a long span of time. I prefer the latter and don’t plan on trying it the other way again. I especially enjoy choosing multiple sets of rhyming words, which underscores the pattern of the form, and creates an undulating music. Sometimes the rhyming words are close and clanging; sometimes they’re far apart and create just a subtle echo.

Another experiment: writing the coda first. We don’t consider that poem a complete failure, but we won’t be doing THAT again.

For a while that first poem remained untitled; “Conspiracy of Leaves” came to me some months after writing the first draft. In the meantime it sat in my documents with the file name “15on14,” and that’s what I called the form at first, though I knew both were only working titles. And then in conversation with B. (who did a residency in radiology in New Orleans before changing his mind and transferring to psychiatry, which is how we ended up in Shreveport, the anti-New Orleans), he made the observation that the form, by holding fifteen more or less unrelated little poems together to create a larger picture, resembled an MRI, which creates a 3D image by stacking many 2D images. So instead of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, we have Poetic Resonance Imaging. PRI, for short.

This is the thing: to write to the end of the line, you really have to cede control to the unconscious, and that’s how it gets interesting. We don’t know where all these narratives come from. But we know when we lay them all together they hint at a bigger picture. This was our aim; or we ought to say: these were our purposes: to create a sort of oracular (as in something to be consulted, a truth-seeking mechanism, not a truism spouter) poetry, and with it to show the interconnectedness of all things.

John Muir wasn’t wrong when he said, “Everything is hitched to everything else,” though he didn’t know that science would eventually prove how right he was. (He also didn’t know that white men aren’t superior, but that’s a subject for another essay, and also an opportunity to observe the psyche’s ability to protect itself from unwelcome truths, like that if everything is hitched to everything else, the crimes of settler colonialism and apartheid as practiced by the US are exactly that: crimes, but also unavoidably self-defeating.)

Ceding control to the unconscious means being able to tell your ego, that control freak, to pipe down. The idea of ego death is silly. The ego is a necessary tool of the mind that serves an important function. But it is NOT the self, and learning how to put it up on the shelf when it’s not the right tool for the job is an important aspect of being human, and a really necessary skill for making any kind of art.

(Here is a practice: be still, in whatever supported posture allows you to be comfortable, but not fall asleep, and allow the waves of your breath to wash your mind down to your heart, until the questioning and complaining end. And then, into that quiet: Hello, Heart-dweller. Then, listen.)

Sometimes they’ve started with nothing but a single-word title, and then I went collecting words that felt useful for an exploration of the material suggested by it. Sometimes, as in the case of the first, and the recent “Head Full Of Stars Under A Sky Full Of Smoke,” the title waits a long time to reveal itself. My most recent, “Keen,” which I’ll share here and will be included in the zine I’m producing for the upcoming Punk and Poetry Festival on May 23, was one of the former. The title came in the middle of the night while I was too sleepy to look for pen and paper. I woke in the morning to find KEEN scrawled on my bathroom mirror in black eyeliner. I do remember I thought of Keen in relation to Howl. (It was in a moment of despair at the destruction being wrought by this kleptocratic Christofascist regime.)

Because we do like a challenge, and because we are committed to doing whatever anti-racist work shows itself available to us, we chose as one of the fourteen words  for the previous  PRI (“Head Full of Stars…”) the word “black,” with the intention never to use it in a negative way (so many of the idioms of our language play into anti-Blackness, and it’s our hope that the refusal to use any of them while managing to use the word fifteen times makes a subliminal suggestion to the reader: from our heart-dweller to theirs).

For “Keen,” considering what’s going on around the country, one of the fourteen words is “brown.” 

(For the life of me I can’t understand people who can see other people as something other than people.)

(Thanks to the way matter exploded into the void of space-time at a single point, everything is quite literally hitched to everything else. There are no two atoms that are not quantumly entangled to a greater or lesser degree. How deliciously alive, this expansive and expanding universe.)

After the words have been chosen and explored, all the sections written, and a title has bubbled up into consciousness, the last step (aside from the usual polishing that goes on over months or years), is to choose some epigraphs. (BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS suffices for this, though I’d love to find a book of women and other marginalized folks mouthing off. As usual, the ladies and people of color are barely represented in Bartlett’s.)

For “Revelations,” which explores, among other things, the contemporary and historical dehumanization and brutalization of women, I chose two. From Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “Violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with ‘the lie.’” And from Simone de Beauvoir: “This has always been a man’s world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.” Something about the way the two quotes relate to each other engenders additional meaning. 

So we offer this form as a contribution to the gift economy (something I read about in a book ages ago the title and author of which escape me, and was explored recently in a gorgeous book by Robin Wall Kimmerer about the serviceberry), in the hope that some of you will pluck up the courage (insanity?) to tackle the form yourselves. Digging around in the rag and bone shop of the heart–as Yeats called it, though he only lay down in his, as if there were no work to be done there–makes for better poems, and for healthier heartminds. We would love to read about your attempts as well as whatever thoughts you have in the comments. We include the table described above at the very end, and share as an example, the two latest, below.

Keen


“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” —Justice Louis D. Brandeis

“At its heart, discrimination against gender non-conforming people happens because of a system that rewards conformity and not creativity…This repression is something we first did to ourselves…We thought fitting in would give us security—but is it security when someone else living their life differently unsettles us to our very core?”  
—Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

“If…the machine of government…is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” —Henry David Theoreau


1.
How long can this regime last when its every beam
’s a rotten plank? He needs you to know his everything’s bigger
than anyone’s, he wallows in faux gilt and velvet.
He’s got masked thugs rounding up anyone brown
but the billionaire-backed media says that doesn’t mean
he’s a racist, or a fascist, and instead they parrot
whatever transparent talking points that Nazi Barbie’s keen
to have them swallow, every outlet emitting a stream
of bullshit Democracy drowns in. All this should trigger
alarm bells, as should the parade of devastating weather 
events FEMA no longer responds to. We watch him feather
his and his cronies’ nests while America’s demise gains steam.
If Trump’s dystopia serves as a stick, what’s the carrot?
Somebody tell that fucker everybody’s money spends green.

2.
The view through this window is almost entirely green.
Foreground, middle, back, just about everywhere a beam
of light lands, it hits a leaf. When the colonists brought wild carrot
they didn’t care it’d become a weed, but it hosts one of our bigger
butterflies, the Eastern Black Swallowtail. In summer, steam
rises after rain, and between blades of grass the verdant velvet
of moss swells. Walking between maple trees, I find a feather
from a blue jay, its stripes of color vivid against the brown
leaf litter. There’s little predictable anymore about the weather,
but I know what dark clouds on the horizon can mean.
Come spring the warming temperatures will trigger
the witch hazel seed pods to pop and startle the parrot
when the seeds hit the windowpanes. I’ll walk to the stream, 
an offering of tobacco in my hand, my eyes keen.

3.
When they started the practice together she wasn’t that keen,
but forest bathing, finding someplace to be in the green,
had healed her. Even better, to sit next to a stream,
splash of water on stone, and watch each beam
of sunlight sparkle. In the trees outside Chicago no parrot
calls, but birdsong’s as good for the nerves as a carrot
is for the gut. She wasn’t sure what had been the trigger,
but by some dark magic her to-do list had grown bigger
than her will. It didn’t help to see all those mean
men grabbing folks as Trump’s putsch picked up steam.
And yes she’s still mad as hell but her own soul’s weather
won’t be manipulated by those goons. She strokes the velvet
of a witch hazel’s leaf bud, let’s her eyes drift down to the brown
leaf litter, drawn by a shock of blue, and finds a feather.

4.
As a boy he was fascinated by the way ink’d feather,
dropped on wet paper. Watching his grandfather, keen
to learn, he picked up much. By eight he was mixing brown,
though the scribes complained when he was trusted with green,
said it looked muddy. By ten, he could mix it slick as velvet.
He was tasked with cleaning brushes in the stream.
It was his favorite part of the day, even in nasty weather,
though on a fine one it seemed to him that every beam
of light carried beauty to his eyes. At home steam
rose from his mother’s cooking pot. In the other room the parrot
screamed. In a dream every little thing could mean
something. But in life? The knife blurred while she chopped a carrot.
He wondered where he’d live when he was bigger.
He didn’t know he couldn’t know what all these loves’d trigger.

5.
The seed pods of jewelweed have a hair trigger:
they explode when you touch them, even feather
light, to hurl their seeds, make their patch bigger.
Anyone walking in the woods, whether you’re keen
to find mushrooms, or fresh air, or to admire wild carrot
mobbed by butterflies: hunt their orange blooms among the brown
and green of bark and leaf. Poison ivy’s sap can mean
misery for many, but rub a handful of jewelweed’s green
leaves on it and it’s neutralized. As kids we learn to parrot
”leaves of three, let it be,” but for most it’s visual velvet,
a smooth mass of green. At home, you can use steam
to make a salve. There’s probably some growing by a stream
near you. In the edifice of plant medicine it’s a significant beam.
What can nature give us to help us manage this weather?

6.
In this and any world, so much depends upon the weather.
A rainy day and its cancellations could trigger
a war, someone left too free to tap dance on the balance beam
of fate, some snub, some slight, with the weight of a feather
that floats for a bit on the surface of causality’s stream
until it lodges in the nostril of a hippo. Someone’s bigger
than you, always, so if you think it’s fine to let off steam
by acting the bully, know that somewhere, someone’s keen
to put you in your place. Fascists like to jump the velvet
rope, while we all toe the line, but lead with the stick and no carrot
will be sweet enough to tempt us after. My little nutty parrot
shows more smarts than the goons Trump’s got as his brown
shirts. Sure, some’re no doubt tempted by all that green,
but when History’s written, nothing is what that will mean.

7.
They want to pretend that we don’t know what heat will mean
when already the small increase gives us wild weather,
mudslides in Appalachia, fire season. When the ice caps green,
the light that bounced off white will make more warmth and trigger
causal cascades, feedback loops. In August the brown
of drought marked leaf tips in my garden, each noon sunbeam
a lash from the cloudless sky. The Petroleum Institute’s lackeys parrot
denialism’s talking points, their words worthless as a feather
at the bottom of my bird’s cage, mixed with shit and half-chewed carrot.
Both red and blue congress critters splash in the fetid stream
of dark money that flows through those chambers, crimson velvet
and gold foil a thin veneer on filth, a bloated tick growing bigger
with every session. How to twist and extract it? We are keen.
Imagine if the coal-mongers had insisted we keep using steam.

8.
He knew he was screwed when he opened the hood and steam
billowed from the radiator. He knew what that would mean.
He couldn’t afford to fix or replace it. He wasn’t keen
to ride the bus, didn’t want days made bad by the weather,
but there were so many things going on that were a bigger
deal than a difficult commute. His colleague here on a green
card had been disappeared from a court room, his girl in velvet
left in tears, clutching her mother. Immanent citizenship shouldn’t trigger
deportation. Already so much, what could be downstream?
Every member of his cabinet, every billionaire bro busy brown
nosing that pedophile with his bronzer in shade of carrot
deserved to be strung up from the highest steel beam
and left there for the crows. Let their flesh become feather.
Let there be no more lies for those creeps to parrot.

9.
It’d been three years since she inherited her grandpa’s parrot,
with its sleek rainbow body and head the color of steam.
At first she had collected every dropped tail feather,
long and red, the blue flight. That she no longer did didn’t mean
she found them less beautiful, the way they played with every beam
of light, but she had a full collection now, and she wasn’t keen
for more clutter. As well as its pellets it needed fresh food: carrot,
peppers, pineapple, so she’d get to the store, no matter the weather.
Checking out, the man before her: a gorgeous shade of brown,
with an accent like her abuelo’s. She wondered what was bigger,
grief for the old man, or fear this one would be caught in the stream
of indiscriminate kidnappings unleashed by that man so green
with envy for Obama’s power, his laughter acted like a trigger.
If she could, she’d make this stranger's path smooth as velvet.

10.
A life-long habit: when made nervous, they’d stroke the velvet
skin at the back of their neck. And now, hearing their classmates parrot
the President’s bullshit about “only two genders,” a certain trigger.
They wondered their ears didn’t release gusts of steam.
Two seats in front of them some prissy girl in a frilly green
sweater was going on about xx and xy, her grasp of biology feather-
lite. They needed to leave before tears of rage could stream
down their cheeks. They knew from experience what that would mean.
What did it matter that most of the time they were bigger
than their bullies? Who threw barbs, not punches. Each beam
of light from the window offered distraction. The red-brown
bark of the cedar there offered solace, echoing the keen
cheekbones of their grandmother’s face, working in harsh weather,
the last time they’d gone home. Yes, this was gold. 24 karat.

11.
Some smart folks from the city don’t know a carrot 
even has “a green part.” They’ve never stroked mullein’s velvet
leaves, never had their livelihood depend upon the weather.
It drove him nuts to hear those jet-setters on the news parrot
the Petroleum Institute’s bromides, all of them so keen
to suck that cash cow. It wouldn’t be his, but some finger on a trigger
would wipe those smiles from their faces. In August the brown
of scorched leaves marred his harvest. After rare rain steam
would rise in the afternoon heat before the water could sink, each beam
from the punishing sun showing the loss. The leaves still green
in the fields begged for water, but the pond? Just mud, and a bigger
water bill would sink them. There was a day you could tar and feather
a politician on the take. He didn’t want that, what it would mean,
but what do they think’s gonna happen, letting that dark money stream?

12.
She could count too many years since she’d just let the tears stream,
and it felt good. So what if Bugs Bunny with his carrot
and his “What’s up, Doc?” had set her off. It didn’t mean
they didn’t rise from a deep well of grief. In her hands the velvet
backing of the needlework pillow from her mother ejected another feather, 
its quill a sharp prick. Maybe her mood was inspired by the weather,
wicked looking clouds piling up on the horizon, the squall line getting bigger
with each glance out the window. On its perch her ancient parrot
squawked, wanting to offer comfort, and she took it, stroking its green
head, happy to let it drain her of this wild desire to keen.
Back on its perch, it did a silly dance, and she let her smile beam.
She reminded herself pent-up grief didn’t need much of a trigger.
Making tea, she tried to remember his face while the steam
billowed. All she could recall was that his eyes were brown.

13.
It’d gotten so he’d think twice now before hiring anyone brown.
Think twice, but do it anyway, whatever might come downstream.
Just the thought of those masked assholes made him steam
under the collar. Don’t even get him started on that carrot-
hued mother fucker. Just the sound of his voice could trigger
apoplexy. He wondered who had taught him being mean
made him manly. What a crock. He’d like to take that beam
out of his eye and crack his skull with it. He’d bet “Blue Velvet”
was his favorite movie, for all the wrong reasons, bet he was keen
to be as cruel as Frank Booth. They were birds of a feather,
for sure. His Manhattanite sister once spent time in the green 
room with him, said it was the worst half-hour she’d had to weather,
between the smell and the way his small talk resembled a parrot
taught phrases by a madman, hoping to make himself seem bigger.

14.
She couldn’t believe as boys those men hoped when they got bigger
they’d end up serving as the equivalent of Hitler’s brown-
shirts. Or maybe they had? They seemed dumb as a parrrot
that shits in its food bowl, rounding up farm workers in a stream
flowing to food rotting in the fields. Farmers feared bad weather
before; this was worse, with Trump’s push not losing steam.
(Goddamn but that man was as nasty as a piece of green
cheese.) Walking between rows, she stopped to pull a carrot
to see how the crop was coming along, and found a red feather.
Her breath caught. Any mention of a cardinal could trigger
grief for her father. How she needed him now! He’d have been keen
to confront Trump’s lawlessness, whatever that would mean.
That bastard had spent his whole life jumping the velvet 
rope, or worse. She needed to see him swinging from the highest beam.

15.
They’d hoped to be free when they got bigger, adulthood the carrot
held out to help them steam their way through school, gender’s velvet
ropes their bane, masculinity’s brown and gray too dull a feather
for their wild heart to weather. Their flare for color didn’t mean
they didn’t want to be a father. A parrot’s plumage could trigger
a violent stream of tears down their cheeks on those days they felt keen
to disappear, but felt their smile beam when they wore pink and green.

———————————

A Head Full of Stars Under A Sky Full of Smoke 

“O kind missionary, O compassionate missionary, leave China! come home 
and convert these Christians!” Samuel Clemens, The United States of Lyncherdom, Europe and Elsewhere (1923).

“A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young.”  Lillian Hellman, Candide (1956) act II, sc. iii. 


1.
In the springtime morning damp, past the forest’s edge, in deep shadow
she forages for fiddleheads, taking only those with the tightest curve.
She’s heard the horror stories, knows in her bones not to toy
with the wrong kind of fern, like bracken, with compounds that damage
DNA. She knows how to tell the difference, but in the dream
that still drifts through her consciousness like smoke
she’d brought home a basketful that turned the cooking water black.
And then her mother had made her drink a whole cup.
She’s glad, as her basket fills, to watch the dream memory weaken.
Though she and her mother do sometimes disagree,
as mothers and daughters have always done, and will to the last,
she couldn’t imagine her ever intentionally hurting her, no, never.
But walking home the disturbing dream continues to infect
the undercurrents of her mind, her mood now fragile as fine china.

2.
She never understood why her mother brought up starving kids in China
when she wouldn’t eat. Other kids’ hunger hung like a shadow
over every meal. Insidious, the idea of hungry children began to infect
even moments away from the table. When the mirror showed a curve
at hip and breast, she stared in horror, vowed to never
eat to satiety again. Her mother would fret when she’d toy
with even her favorite foods, noticed that she never ate the last
bite of anything. The more she cajoled, the more damage
she did. She took it personally. She and her dad would disagree.
“Leave her be,” he’d say. “If she’s not hungry…” He didn’t dream
his daughter could fall in love with hunger, watched her weaken
as emptiness filled her, had no idea that she’d smoke
cigarettes to dull the pain. Mornings, he put milk and sugar in his cup
never wondering why his daughter chose to drink her coffee black.

3.
It wasn’t the first time he regretted the heaviness of those black-
out curtains, after talking all night with his fiancé in China.
By the time he’d managed to crawl out of bed and pour a cup
of strong coffee it was well after noon, and the shadow
of the oak tree stretched across the snowy yard. Woodsmoke 
rose from the neighbors’ chimney. How many would the virus infect?
How deranged, that those politicians would seek to weaken
the scientists’ attempts to get people to flatten the curve.
Since the pandemic began everything had felt like a bad dream.
He knew things might get scary when that madman won, but he’d never
have guessed he’d lead half the country to violently disagree
with safeguarding public health. It was like the world was a toy
for Trump’s amusement, nothing more. He didn’t care how much damage
he caused, how many lives would be lost, how long the misery would last.

4.
When the storm rolled in no one guessed how long it would last.
Though it was just midmorning the sky turned almost black.
The mix of straight-line winds and relentless rain did such damage—
pines ripped out of the ground, old oaks snapped like fragile china—
no one was left unaffected. One church caved in like a toy
made of blocks. The floodplain overflowed like a cup
filled by someone looking the other way. You might disagree
about what all this means. No one can prove beyond a shadow
of a doubt what any one storm signifies, but folks say they never
saw anything like this before. Only fools think you can have smoke
without fire. Denial festers in those afraid to face truth, who dream
of a world that responds to their desires, where viruses won’t infect
them, and only their lives matter. The cosmos doesn’t grade on a curve.
How much suffering will be necessary for denial’s grip to weaken?

5.
Thank goodness religion’s grip on our culture continues to weaken.
I hope to live to see the day when it breathes its last
metaphorical breath; we still need to round this hazardous curve,
as it puts up a fight. You have to wonder when pastors can’t say Black
lives matter. It’s not just viruses: they’re vectors that infect
their followers with horrible ideas, dogmas that do damage
to relationships, to children’s self esteem, to the very dream
of harmony and equality. Christians tell Asians to go back to China,
while the idea of peace in the Middle East goes up in smoke.
Religious Americans encourage their sons to play with toy
soldiers, never mind that our wars of empire are unjust, never
mind the evils they always bring. This is the poisoned cup
we’re asked to sip from. There are monsters lurking in the shadow
of every steeple. Of course men who make money from it may disagree.

6.
Here’s the thing: reality doesn’t care if you disagree
with it. It doesn’t change, and the more your grip on it weakens,
the more you end up with your mind darkened by your own shadow.
How long a poor soul’s derangement will last
often depends on how many others are sipping from the same cup
of crazy, though sometimes the cosmos can throw you a curve
to wake you right up. But in a congregation some never 
manage, swayed by belonging, comfortable with the black-
and-white take on things, unwilling to even toy
with the idea of questioning the given, willing, even eager, to infect
others with their lunacy. Would that we could watch smoke
rise from religion’s funeral pyre. You can’t overstate the damage
that crap has done; it’s beyond the proverbial bull in a china
shop. That we all know we are one with the world, that’s my dream.

7.
As a baby their son would crawl into their bed after a bad dream.
At first it seemed cute, but as he grew they began to disagree
over whether to keep allowing it. Once, putting away the china
after a dinner party, it came up again, and she felt her resolve weaken,
decided it would be better to tell the boy “no” than to risk damage
to their marriage. But the forced decision followed her like a shadow.
Years later when she came home to find the house smelled of pot smoke
she blamed the transgression on that “trauma,” and it wasn’t the last
she thought of it. Before long the memory began to infect
most of her waking moments. It was there when she poured her cup
of coffee, there when she tried to sleep. Like a broken toy
she couldn’t throw away, useless and sad. A steep learning curve,
this parenting business! The boy stood crying in the almost black,
begging. When would she get over this? Probably never.

8.
Let’s be honest: most folks know in their hearts Christ is never
coming back. And that Rapture thing’s just a fevered dream
of a Protestant hack. It’s trash theology, like that Black
folk descend from Ham, condemned to serve, soulless. Disagree,
and you’ll be wrong. Drive your car too fast around a curve
and you’ll fly off the road, whatever you think. Drop china
and it breaks, however dear. It’s monstrous, the way clerics toy
with the minds and hearts of their flocks. How do we weaken
the grasp of all these deranged hands on this pestilential cup?
Would anyone indoctrinate their child if they understood the damage
they did? To shackle a child’s mind to nonsense, to infect
their self-esteem with this need for salvation. Religion’s shadow
falls dark and deep across all of History. Let this be the last 
generation to wrestle this wicked angel, inhale this putrid smoke.

9.
In one hand she holds a smoldering bundle of dried herbs, smoke
directed by the crow-feather fan in the other. She’d thought she’d never
be here again, practicing this craft, thought her faith would last
forever. Now the years she spent in church seem a bad dream,
already fading, and she happily embraces her own shadow.
She finds comfort and beauty in whatever version of black,
call it midnight, raven, jet, and she hopes to infect
the faithful with curiosity, with doubt, to help them disagree
with the dogmas they’ve swallowed, to help undo the damage
to their self-worth. Imagine seeing anything unwholesome in the curve
of a woman’s breast. Whispering words of offering, she lifts the cup
of blackberry juice and sips, takes a bite from the cake resting on the china
plate come down from her great great grandmother. To weaken
patriarchy’s stranglehold’s her goal, a preacher’s mind: her favorite toy.

10.
Since his youth he had played with his mind like a child with a toy.
If a plant had been used by some culture to seek visions he’d smoke
it, fascinated by the plasticity of perception. This didn’t weaken
his grasp on reality; it strengthened it. Someone who has never
watched the walls melt on acid or their identity fracture like dropped china
can imagine that there’s something to them that’s real, that will last,
but someone who’s had the courage to sip from the psychedelic cup
has a shot at realizing we’re all just characters in the cosmos’ dream,
just excitations in the quantum field. The way a wave’s curve
collapses back into the sea: this is death. But instead the shadow
of eternity haunts most of us, secretly fearful of the damage
we have done to our chances at Heaven. Tomorrow if a black
cat crosses his path he won’t worry, though the superstitious would disagree.
Sometimes seems there’s nothing left on this planet for those fools to infect.

11.
They didn’t teach us in school about the blankets used to infect
the defeated Indigenous peoples with smallpox. Imagine giving a toy
to a child in the hopes of doing her harm. You can disagree
all you want, but America, blue or red, is an evil empire. The smoke
that rose from those twin towers and turned the sky black
above Manhattan was our comeuppance. Listen: we must weaken
the corporatocracy or it will continue its madness, will damage
beyond repair the very systems that enable life. We’ll never
see justice until we face this truth, that the shadow
cast by American imperialism darkens the whole world. China
is besieged by our bases, but they’re aggressive?. On the Bell curve
of wickedness we land near the far right. This must be the last
generation subjected to the mindfuck of the American dream.
They cannot make us keep drinking from this vomitous cup.

12.
Lovely, the way we can make of our hands a cup.
Can we keep them clean enough so as not to infect
our kids with what we carry to their mouths? My dream
as a new mother: at least to do no harm. But the toy
aisles were divided into pink and blue, and every last
item made for one or the other. There’s good reason to disagree
with the gender binary, but it’s all we were offered. Around the curve
we’re turning now lies a beautiful world, or a worse. The smoke
of many fires clouds the horizon. I would swim to China
and back if it would help you understand that Black
trans lives matter. Cis-het hate casts a deadly shadow.
In the name of religious freedom Christians want to weaken
the laws protecting our most vulnerable, but we will never
go back to those days. They already have done enough damage.

13.
Of course he wouldn’t have said it had he known the damage
his words would do. You can’t get spilled milk back in the cup,
but he couldn’t stop saying that he promised, he never
meant to hurt her. He feared his careless comment would infect
every future encounter, wondered how much it would weaken
his chances. The day they’d met had seemed a dream,
her beauty magnified by the play of light and shadow
as they walked under trees at the park. They’d found a toy
train, a stout little engine painted red and black,
and he’d found her concern endearing as she asked every last
kid they came across if they had lost it. A girl from China
finally claimed it. If he had known how strongly she’d disagree
he would have kept his opinion to himself. He’d smoke
whatever she wanted if it would get them around this curve.

14.
It’s been so long since you’ve laid your hand on another human, curve
and hollow of flesh, the warm press of friends. What damage
this loneliness does, the way it seeps into your heart, like smoke
ruining more than the flames. What you would give to cup
your mother’s face in your hands again, though you disagree
with her about almost everything. When this started you never
would have guessed how it would go, the news out of China.
You wonder how many more millions the virus will infect,
wonder how much longer this misery can last.
You want to do the right thing but can feel your resolve weaken
with each week that grinds past. Your neighbor, who’s Black,
has already lost so much family. You wouldn’t dream
of feeling sorry for yourself. You’ll go online and buy a toy
to make some poor kid’s Christmas, help lighten this shadow.

15.
In the curve of a fern leaf or the DNA of a virus that will infect
millions who never saw it coming, math plays with matter like a toy.
Ignorance does damage to more than the ignorant. Can we make this the last
time we disagree about the knowable? Consensus is no dream,
but Capital throws a smokescreen, and corrupt politicians weaken
protections. The fragile cup of sky cannot take much more, clear as black
and white. Coal’s shadow, and that of gas and oil, stretch from here to China.